Installing and using the source distribution

The Kawa release normally comes as a gzip-compressed tar file named
‘kawa-2.0.tar.gz’.
Two methods are supporting for compiling the Kawa sources;
choose whichever is most convenient for you.

One method uses the traditional GNU configure script,
followed by running make. This works well on Unix-like
systems, such as GNU/Linux.
You can also use this method on Microsoft Windows,
as long as use http://www.cygwin.org/. Cygwin.

The other method uses the ant command, a Java-based
build system released by Apache’s Jakarta project. This uses
an build.xml file in place of Makefiles, and
works on non-Unix systems such as Microsoft Windows. However,
the ant method does not support all
the features of the configure+make method.

Build Kawa using configure and make

In your build directory do:

tar xzf kawa-2.0.tar.gz
cd kawa-2.0

Then you must configure the sources. This you can do
the same way you configure most other GNU software. Normally
you can just run the configure script with no arguments:

./configure

This will specify that a later make install will install the
compiled ‘.class’ files into /usr/local/share/java.
If you want them
to be installed someplace else, such as $PREFIX/share/java, then
specify that when you run configure:

./configure --prefix $PREFIX

If you have the GNU ‘readline’ library installed, you might try
adding the ‘--enable-kawa-frontend’ flag. This will build the
‘kawa’ front-end program, which provides input-line editing
and an input history. You can get ‘readline’ from archives
of GNU programs, including ftp://www.gnu.org/.

If you have Swing installed, and want to use JEmacs (Emacs in Java),
also pass the --with-swing flag to configure.

If you have installed Kawa before, make sure your CLASSPATH
does not include old versions of Kawa, or other classes that may
conflict with the new ones.

As distributed, the Kawa source code requires Java 7.
If you only have Java 6 or Java 5, use the --with-have-source option:

./configure --with-java-source=5

Kawa no longer supports older verisons of Java (JDK 1.4 or older).
It might be possible to use a tool
like Retroweaver
on the Kawa .jar to fix up Java 5 dependencies.
Contact the Kawa author if you want to be a tester for this.

Then you need to compile all the .java source files.
Just run make:

make

This assumes that ‘java’ and ‘javac’ are the java interpreter
and compiler, respectively.
For example, if you are using the Kaffe Java interpreter,
you need to instead say:

make JAVA=kaffe

It has been reported that parallel make doesn’t work,
so don’t use the -j2 or above options.

If you configured with --enable-kawa-frontend, you
may need to specify READLINE_INCLUDE_PATH or READINE_LIB_PATH.
For example on OS/X you need to do:

This will install your classes into $PREFIX/share/java (and its
sub-directories). Here $PREFIX is the directory you specified
to configure with the --prefix option, or /usr/local if you
did not specify a --prefix option.

To use the installed files, you need to set CLASSPATH so
that $PREFIX/share/java/kawa.jar is in the path:

CLASSPATH=$PREFIX/share/java/kawa.jar
export CLASSPATH

This is done automatically if you use the ‘kawa’ script.

Build Kawa using ant

Kawa now includes an Ant buildfile (build.xml).
Ant is a part of the Apache
Jakarta project.
If you don’t hava Ant installed,
get it from http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi.
The build is entirely Java based and works equally well on *nix, Windows,
and presumably most any other operating system.

Once Ant has been installed and configured (you may need to set the
JAVA_HOME, and ANT_HOME environment variables), you should
be able to change to the directory containing the build.xml file,
and invoke the ‘ant’ command. With the default settings, a
successful build will result in a kawa-2.0.jar in the
current directory.

There are a few Ant "targets" of interest (they can be supplied on the
Ant command line):

all

This is the default, it does classes and jar.

classes

Compiles all the files into *.class files into the directory
specified by the build.dir property.

jar

Builds a jar into into the directory
specified by the dist.dir property.

runw

Run Kawa in a GUI window.

clean

Deletes all files generated by the build, including the jar.

There is not yet a test target for running the testsuite.

The are various "properties" that control what ant does. You can
override the on the command line or by editing the
build.properties file in the same directory as build.xml.
For example the build.dir directory tells ant where to
build temporary files, and where to leave the resulting .jar
file. For example, to leave the generated files in the sub-directory
named BUILD do:

ant -Dbuild.dir=BUILD

A sample build.properties is provided and it contains
comments explaining many of the options.

Here are a few general properties that help to customize your build:

build.dir

Path to put the temporary files used for building.

dist.dir

Path to put the resulting jar file.

version.local

A suffix to add to the version label for your customized version.

debug

Whether (true/false) the Javac "-g" option is enabled.

optimize

Whether (true/false) the Javac "-O" option is enabled.

Here are some Kawa-specific ones (all true/false):
with-collections, with-references, with-awt,
with-swing, enable-jemacs, and enable-servlet>
See the sample build.properties for more information on these.

If you change any of the build properties, you will generally want to do
an ‘ant clean’ before building again as the build is often not able to
notice that kind of change. In the case of changing a directory path,
you would want to do the clean before changing the path.

A special note for NetBeans users:
For some reason the build-tools target which compiles an Ant task won’t
compile with the classpath provided by NetBeans.
You may do ‘ant build-tools’ from the command line outside of NetBeans,
in which case you will not want to use the clean target as that
will delete the tool files as well.
You can use the clean-build and/or clean-dist
targets as appropriate. Alternatively you can add ant.jar to the
build-tools classpath by copying or linking it into a lib/ext
directory in Kawa’s source directory (the one containing the build.xml
file).

The Kawa configure and make process assumes a Unix-like
environment. The free Cygwin
environment can be used for building Kawa: The Kawa configure script
recognizes Cygwin, and modifies the classpath to use Windows-style
path separators. (At the time of writing there were still some
path issues with running the testsuite.)